.
. . if such a long and explicitly qualified use of creation was needed
to let it carry the meaning of creation out of nothing, it may seem unlikely
that a verb, bara, can take on a very special meaning (divine action,
different as it may be from creation out of nothing) only when it is used in
two (Kal and Nifil) of its dozen tenses. Moreover, of the forty or so cases
when bara occurs in the Old Testament, it is used to denote in five cases
a purely human action. That of those five cases only three are absolutely
incontrovertible will surprise only those who are unaware of the difficulties
concerning the transmission of Hebrew biblical texts while still in manuscript
form. Uncertain, indeed, are the readings of bara in 1 Sam 2:23 and Ez
21:24. In the former passage, Eli asks his sons “Why are you doing such
things?,” that is, having sexual relations with the women, serving at the
entrance of the tent housing the Ark of the Covenant. In the latter, Ezekiel
reports the Lord’s command to him “to make for yourself two roads over which
the sword of the king of Babylon can come.”
Of
the three other and certain readings, the ones in the book of Joshua (17:15,
18) refer to the tense Piel to the cutting down of trees. The connotation is so
human as to appear distasteful in those ecologically sensitive times. On being faced
with what today would be called a problem of overpopulation, Joshua decides
against the ecology. He does so on divine instruction which tells him to send
people up to the mountains and clear them of forests. One could only wish that
the translators had the courage to evoke the basic meaning of bara by
speaking not of the clearing of forests but the hacking down of trees.
In
Ez 23:47 we see the prophet use bara to denote a gruesomely human
action, prompted as it could be by Yahweh’s utter displeasure with idolatry.
According to the prophet, Yahweh ordered that an assembly be convoked and enjoined
“to hack to pieces with their swords” those who had committed adultery with two
lewd women, Oholah and Oholibah. Concerning the meaning of bara in this
context it makes no difference whether those two women are to be taken in a
real or symbolic sense.
It
would seem significant that both in the book of Ezechiel, certainly a
post-exilic product, and in the book of Joshua, a product quite possibly some
seven hundred years older, one is confronted with a very human connotation of bara,
a verb which exegetes love to raise a quasi-divine pedestal. The significance
remains intact whether one takes Genesis 1 for a Mosaic document, or for a
post-Davidic composition, or even for a post-Exilic one, the latter being the
most likely case. In all these cases the taking of bara for an
exclusively divine action, let alone for taking it for creation out of nothing,
can only be done if one overlooks those three uses of it that span more than
half a millennium.
The
verb bara basically means “to split” and “to slash,” or an action which
conveys that something is divided and that the action is done swiftly. God, of
course, can, unlike humans perform such an act with utter effortlessness on an immensely
vaster scale than the greatest within human fact. In the overwhelming number of
its Old-Testament uses bara conveys the notion that God dis something
with marvelous ease and speed. (Stanley L. Jaki, Genesis 1 Through the Ages [2d
ed.; Edinburgh: Real View Books, 1998], 6-8, emphasis in bold added)
